Bluetik.io

Mike Taber, who co-hosted Startup for the Rest of Us for the first 448 episodes, built Bluetik.io as a cold and warm email follow-up software solution for sales teams needing personal outreach at scale. The product focuses on helping users manage their follow-up email campaigns more effectively, positioned as complementary to CRM and sales infrastructure tools.

About 8-9 months before this conversation, Mike entered into what was supposed to be a brief consulting arrangement with a fellow entrepreneur who runs a field sales CRM. That CRM product features iOS and Android mobile apps, web-based SaaS, voice transcription for notes, call tracking, and email tracking capabilities. What started as a planned 3-5 month engagement evolved into an 8-10 month commitment due to COVID-related delays affecting the entrepreneur's ability to sell his other businesses and transition fully to the CRM project.

During this period, Mike managed a development team of about a dozen people, overhauled the technical infrastructure, and made significant improvements. Most notably, he cut approximately $25,000 annually from their AWS bills through re-architecting and optimization work. He identified about a year's worth of technical debt using SonarCloud analysis and was overseeing a complete rebuild of the mobile apps from scratch due to structural issues in the original codebase.

With the other entrepreneur's previous business sales finalized, they are now in a 3-4 month trial period to determine the best way forward—either a merger of the two products, a tight integration while maintaining separate applications, or potentially both. One particularly promising opportunity emerged: offering Bluetik as a "done for you" service to the CRM's existing customer base. Since field sales reps typically aren't strong at constructing and managing email campaigns, Bluetik could be positioned as an upsell, bringing revenue to both products while deepening customer integration.

Mike acknowledged the risk that after investing this time, the partnership could fall apart. However, he views it as asymmetric upside: the downside is wasted time, but the upside could be transformational for both businesses. He's learned valuable lessons about infrastructure, development management, and technical debt mitigation that apply directly to his own product.

Mike is currently evaluating an AppSumo deal for Bluetik, which could provide both cash injection and customer development opportunities. However, he's cautious about the economics. Bluetik operates on a subscription model ($50, $150, and $500/month plans) with per-customer infrastructure costs. AppSumo's primary appeal to customers is lifetime deals, which could create unsustainable long-term costs if too many users consume significant storage or processing resources.

He's analyzing whether adding viral components (a "Powered by Bluetik" footer in sent emails) and potentially a freemium tier could make an AppSumo deal viable. He's running detailed financial scenarios to determine how many additional monthly customers would need to convert from the AppSumo exposure to offset the lifetime deal costs.

Another ongoing pain point is Google's annual security audit requirement, which he must renew to maintain access to Gmail APIs. The vendor quoted him nearly double the previous year's cost despite claiming it would be cheaper for a renewal. Mike pushed back, questioning how the previous year's work could suddenly be worthless while costs doubled.

Throughout it all, Mike is managing competing demands: his full-time consulting work with the CRM business, ongoing technical infrastructure work, Bluetik development and support, and strategic evaluation of major business moves like AppSumo and the partnership trial.